I did. I started something new and big. And here it is, July 2020, four years later, and finally the something new, and, as it turned out very big, is about to be born. I wrote a novel.
Imbolc is an old Gaelic word, there in the earliest of writings. It means “in the belly” and it is easy to see why this turning point in the old Celtic and Gaelic calendars was named for it.
My Halloween lantern for tonight. A particularly daggy one, but Happy Halloween everyone anyway everyone! I am remembering to be grateful for what I have inherited from the ancestors, generation through generation. Music, stories, art, science, inventions, roads, trainlines, medicine, tools. I am remembering to be grateful, and in gratitude, pay it forward.
There is a huge amount of skill and knowledge in living a simple, green,, frugal life. This is not peasant unskilled labour. This is application of intelligence, design, creative thinking, experimentation, research and practice to deeply held values. Simplicity is often deceptive. Simplicity is elegant, refined, efficient, beautifully designed, and highly skilled.
I’ve ticked off one of my New Year’s Resolutions. We’ve just come home from a week in wild weather at Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island – one of the most beautiful wild places on earth. I went swimming in the surf every day, collected seaweed for my seaweed brew, and walked around North Gorge every morning.
I really am much too busy to read labels that much. I don’t want to be that diligent. It really is much easier to just apply my blanket rule: if it doesn’t go off, if even bacteria and funghi won’t eat it, be suspicious, be very suspicious.
There are some things I think you need to do at least once every year to remember you are alive, to remember what is important and valuable, to stay sane. And some years, the whole year goes past without me doing them.
This post is full of contradictions. I’ve spent my Easter Saturday holiday getting very scratched and itchy, bitten by ticks and leeches, tired and sore, clearing lantana just so we could get to the worse weed – Madeira vine (Anredera cordifolia). I had a wonderful morning doing it in a group with friends, really satisfying to see the difference we made in one session.
Spotted on my morning walk, a fine fat fellow looking very relaxed in a tree right next to our driveway. It is easy to imagine if you live in a city that wildlife is happily safely securely flourishing “somewhere else”. You hear about extinctions but maybe you don’t get just how profound it is.
Life goes back to normal. Or will never be quite the same. This morning the Petroleum Exploration License for Metgasco to frack for gas at Bentley was suspended and referred to ICAC.